was a

lieutenant general Lieutenant general (Lt Gen, LTG and similar) is a three-star military rank (NATO code OF-8) used in many countries. The rank traces its origins to the Middle Ages, where the title of lieutenant general was held by the second-in-command on th ...

in the

Imperial Japanese Army The was the official ground-based armed force of the Empire of Japan from 1868 to 1945. It was controlled by the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff Office and the Ministry of the Army, both of which were nominally subordinate to the Emper ...

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

Biography

Masaki Honda was born in

Nagano prefecture is a landlocked prefecture of Japan located in the Chūbu region of Honshū. Nagano Prefecture has a population of 2,052,493 () and has a geographic area of . Nagano Prefecture borders Niigata Prefecture to the north, Gunma Prefecture to the ...

and graduated from the

Imperial Japanese Army Academy The was the principal officer's training school for the Imperial Japanese Army. The programme consisted of a junior course for graduates of local army cadet schools and for those who had completed four years of middle school, and a senior course f ...

in 1910 and the Army War College in 1917. He was an instructor and in 1939 Commandant of the Army Infantry School. After his promotion to

Lieutenant-General Lieutenant general (Lt Gen, LTG and similar) is a three-star military rank (NATO code OF-8) used in many countries. The rank traces its origins to the Middle Ages, where the title of lieutenant general was held by the second-in-command on the ...

in October 1939, he became deputy chief of staff of the

China Expeditionary Army The was a general army of the Imperial Japanese Army from 1939 to 1945. The China Expeditionary Army was established in September 1939 from the merger of the Central China Expeditionary Army and Japanese Northern China Area Army, and was headq ...

until October 1940, when he received command of the

IJA 8th Division The was an infantry division in the Imperial Japanese Army. It was formed 1 October 1898 in Hirosaki, Aomori, as one of the six new reserve divisions created after the First Sino-Japanese War and was annihilated in the Philippines during the P ...

which was active in

Manchuria Manchuria is an exonym (derived from the endo demonym " Manchu") for a historical and geographic region in Northeast Asia encompassing the entirety of present-day Northeast China (Inner Manchuria) and parts of the Russian Far East (Outer M ...

. In June 1942, he was recalled to Japan to become Head of Army Armor Headquarters, until March 1943 when he returned to Manchuria to lead the 20th Army. On April 7, 1944 a new 33rd Army was raised in Burma in anticipation of Allied attempts to retake northern Burma, and Masaki Honda became its commander. With this outnumbered and ill-equipped Army he fought in the

Burma Campaign 1944–45 Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John Wells explai ...

, where he performed very creditable defensive actions against the enemy, including a brilliant evacuation of the IJA 56th Division from under the noses of the advancing Chinese on 4 February 1945. But finally, his scattered and broken army had to withdraw to Southern Burma, where he surrendered in August 1945. Honda retired from the Army in 1947 and died in 1964.

References

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Honda, Masaki 1889 births 1964 deaths Japanese military personnel of World War II Japanese generals People from Nagano Prefecture